Educator of the Year
Mr. Fairfield

Many of the schools that I have attended have always had their share of good and not-so-good teachers. Out of all of them though, my nomination for educator of the year would be Mr. Fairfield, my 6th grade social studies teacher. Mr. Fairfield taught not just me but everyone that he teaches about life values, how to stay positive, and how to overcome obstacles. If anything, he was a great life coach. He had told me things that I had never heard anyone say before and he wasn’t afraid to offer his opinion on anything. He is the kind of teacher that you truly understand and capture his personality. And that’s not even including that he taught my favorite subject, Social Studies.
When I first started middle school at H.B., I was honestly quite scared. I knew many of my friends would be going there, and luckily, many of them were in my class. I was still nervous nonetheless. I went through the first day of school routine and finally came into a classroom: RM 118 Mr. Fairfield. As soon as I walked in, I assumed that he would be like any other teacher, but that all changed very quickly. As he started taking attendance and said to me, “Berkeley? That’s a strange name. Excellent.”
He was the first teacher to say my name right. His teaching style was very different than any other teacher I have had previously and really helped me learn better than the “Here’s what we’re doing, here’s an example. Do it,” approach. I remember the first big homework assignment that he told us to do was this huge map and we had to memorize all of Europe in a matter of a week or.
He actually taught the class a little memory tool that I still use today when taking map tests: Try to make rows in the continent, and for each country, remember the first letter of the name and try to make the row into a word. Little would I know that I would use that trick beyond middle school and into high school. It’s when the teacher makes a fun way to do tests; you know he’s a good teacher. I was actually excited to wake up just to have his class in the afternoon. Mr. Fairfield showed me that there are some ways of teaching that can help students retain more information while enjoying it as well.
Mr. Fairfield has made a big impact in my life about his opinions on things, his ideas that he was never nervous to share with us, and even how he felt about certain dilemmas happening in the school. I would even go out on a limb and say that he has affected more lives than just mine, but my friends’ as well. He was not your average teacher and he was never boring to learn from. Kind, hardworking, funny, and way more are perfect ways to describe Mr. Fairfield. I have never had a teach that was so dead set on making sure you left his class learning something new and something for the next year of school.